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Abstract
This study predicted that variations in the content of a narrative organ donor appeal (i.e., the age of the donor, the age of the person whose life was saved, the donor's cause of death, and the number of people whose lives were saved) would have a differential impact on a person's affective and cognitive reactions to that message, which would in turn influence a person's attitude toward signing an organ donor card. Two hundred sixty-eight individuals who had not signed an organ donor card previously read one of several narratives and then answered a series of questions designed to measure their attitudes toward signing an organ donor card. These data revealed that how a person dies (accident vs natural causes) and the number of people who are saved through organ donation indirectly influence a person's attitude toward signing an organ donor card with vividness, sympathy, and happiness acting as mediating variables. These findings and their implications are discussed.
The authors would like to thank Rachel Menge and Candice Taffolla for their input and assistance in the early stages of this paper.
Notes
1. Although Ah Yun and Massi (2000) did not find an effect for message type across all participants, the study did find that Latino and African-American participants found the statistical based organ donation message to be more persuasive than the narrative one.
2. In order to ensure that the narratives produced for this study were inducing the intended perceptions, a pilot test of the narratives was conducted. All of the induction check items were created by the authors of this study. Four items were used to measure respondents’ perceptions of each experimental induction: the donor's age, the age of the person whose life was saved, the donor's cause of death, and the number of people saved. Standardized item alpha for these scales was 0.94, 0.91, 0.93, and 0.94, respectively. The correlations revealed that the donor's age (r=0.48, p<0.01), the age of the person whose life was saved (r=0.74, p<0.001), the donor's cause of death (r=0.78, p<0.001), and the number of people whose lives were saved (r=0.34, p<0.01) induced the desired response from participants. As such, the data were consistent with the anticipated inductions and these narratives were used in the main experiment. Participants’ perceptions of the believability of the message were also assessed to be sure that subjects found the messages plausible. Perceptions of believability were measured with four items and had a mean of 5.28 (SD=0.98; SIα=0.92) which was significantly above the midpoint of the scale, t(56) = 7.95, p<0.001, two-tailed, r=0.72.
3. Measurement scales are available from the first author.
